The satyrs had brought the Lion’s corpse back with them,at some point.

It wasn’t the first time Rusty had seen a corpse. He’d been working on a farm since he had been out of diapers, and every farmer’s child learned early on that animals were only temporary friends. And the process of turning those friends into food was gruesome, but necessary.

It wasn’t even the first time that he’d seen the corpse of a person. His time in Elythia had not been kind.

But this was different.

They’d put him in the center of the ruined stone fortress, where the light from the high, oddly-cut window holes shone down in beams to illuminate the most shadowed heart of the structure. His people had placed metal and glass and bits of shiny, reflective materials all throughout the oddly narrow room, more like a vertical mineshaft than a hall. As a result, the sun’s rays were channeled and redirected into a maze of light, culminating in a bright halo that encircled the altar-like bier that the Lion’s corpse rested upon.

He lay upon flowers, Rusty noticed as his escort’s hoofbeats echoed through the chamber, and his friends followed a few paces behind. Big, red flowers that weren’t too dissimilar from the shade of fresh blood.

“Why hasn’t he rotted? It’s been a week,” Rusty heard Ken whisper behind him. He looked up to Omen of Raster, saw the satyr’s ear twitch and the visible eye narrow a bit. But the satyr said nothing.

“I do not rot because they preserved my previous vessel’s husk,” the Lion said, pacing unseen by all others in Rusty’s peripheral vision. “And fear not. Omen used a translation charm to speak with you. He is not wasting its charge upon understanding the others at the minute.”

Rusty opened his mouth, shut it again. He had to think, had to remember that. “What happens now?”

“An intense amount of pain, I fear. You must absorb at least one of the runes that we had collected. You should survive. It may even speed your recovery from the surgery.”

Rusty’s back throbbed and burned, as the Lion spoke, as if it had heard him and remembered oh yeah, I need to torment this kid.

Grimly, Rusty considered his choices.

The Lion’s armored body was a good nine or ten feet tall, and armored in mismatched, scavenged plates of metal. The form beneath was misshapen, and malformed, but fortunately most of that wasn’t visible under the armor… well, the visor had been shredded from where that weirdo had blown a hole in his head with a double-barreled shotgun, but some satyr or grach had put a cloth over the remnants of his face. So that helped.

The runes helped even more.

They were impossible to miss… jagged spires of crystal that seemingly grew out of the Lion’s body, ranging from a few inches to half a foot long, looking like a mix between stalagmites and clusters of sea urchins. They shone in glittering hues, a dance of mismatched colors against the battered bronze of the Lion’s armored corpse.

“Start by stripping the charms from my mane, and look solemn while you do it.” the Lion said. “Take your time about this task, and gather your nerve. The next part will be difficult beyond measure.”

With a ‘pop,’ Roz appeared next to the Lion, his hands on his hips. “Why don’t we talk about that next part, buddy? We don’t even know if we want to help you yet.”

“If you do not, then the Unicorn’s minions will come for you. And you will be slain, and I with you. This version of myself, anyway.”

“This version?” Rusty slowed down a step. Immediately the satyrs gathered around the chamber looked to him, and shifted on their hooves. Rusty shook his head, and hurried forward again. I have to act like everything’s normal.

The Lion answered his question. “I fight many wars on many worlds. At least, I did. I have not been able to speak with any of my other branches for some time. The Unicorn is winning.”

“Okay,” Roz said, folding his arms and hovering as he kept pace, floating and frowning. “So what’s the next part that’s supposed to be so difficult?”

“You will have to absorb the rune of speed.” The Lion flickered, and appeared next to its old body, tail pointing at the red crystal that had buckled and broken through the center of his chestpate, warping the metal where it had burst free. “Without it, you cannot fight the elves. They will kill you the second you take the field.”

Rusty reached the corpse. Omen of Raster bowed over his hand, and stepped back.

“I guess we paying our respects,” Rusty heard Alice whisper to Ken.

“You are. I… we’re retrieving what is ours,” Rusty said. It seemed like the appropriate thing to say. And he moved around to where the Lion’s hair poked out from under the cloth that covered his ruined head.

This close, the corpse stunk. The Lion’s former host had reeked before he died, and death hadn’t done anything to improve that. The flowers helped a bit, masking the worst of it with a smell that was somewhere between strawberries and cough drops, but it took Rusty a few seconds to get control of his stomach. Gingerly, he reached to the small knife that was lying on the stone slab, and started cutting the bone and metal tokens out of the corpse’s hair.

“Okay. We’re doing the thing. And you say we need to absorb the speed rune?” Roz sat on the altar, and kicked his legs as he glared at the Lion.

“Yes. And you must do it without screaming.”

Rusty’s breath hitched in his throat. “I’m not so sure I can do that,” he thought to the magical creatures in his head.

Runes were magical crystals. When a person jammed them into their flesh, the crystal melted into them, linking up with their brain and giving them powers. But it hurt. Even beyond the fact that you basically had to stab yourself with a crystal knife, the runes Rusty had absorbed had made every bit of his body feel like fire ants were chomping their way through every nerve he had. The first rune had been torture, and the second rune had made the first one feel like a tickle fight with his little brothers.

And from what the Lion had implied earlier, the pain got worse with every rune added.

“I know, it is much to ask,” the Lion said, slumping down and turning its many-eyed head to the floor. “But they will expect you to absorb the rune without showing too much weakness, because this is the ritual that I have established in the past.”

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“Well how’d you do it?” Roz asked. “What’s the trick, daddy-o?”

“The trick is that I had fully merged with each previous host. I shielded them from the pain their own bodies inflicted. But you stole the memory of how to do this, when you cast your spell upon me,” the Lion said, looking up to Rusty. “We are only a partial merge. I cannot take your pain for you. Even if you would permit it, I do not remember how!”

Rusty’s hands trembled, as he took a breath. He steadied himself by laying the charms upon each other, clinking metal to metal, and clacking bone on bone. They bore intricate symbols, engraved and stained in languages he couldn’t read. He’d have to fix that, he knew. His rune of memory would let him gain false memories of learning alien languages, but he didn’t have time to mess with that right now. He had to figure out how to get through what he was pretty sure was the worst ordeal he’d face in this whole mess, and he had to figure that out in the next couple of minutes. There weren’t that many charms in the Lion’s mane. He couldn’t stall forever.

“What if I gave you back the memories of how to do that?” Rusty asked the Lion.

“No!” Roz said. “I mean bad idea. This cat isn’t our friend. Letting him take over any part of our body risks him grabbing all the marbles. And speaking as a marble, I don’t wanna get grabbed.”

“Honesty bids me say that you should not,” the Lion said.

“Wait, what?” Roz squinted at the cat, hands on hips. “What are you playing at?”

“Even were the memories to be returned, I do not know that I could suppress your pain without bonding with you fully. I just don’t remember enough to know the details of how it works. And regardless, you do not wish to bond with me fully. Until and unless you change your mind on that, I cannot directly aid you with this, or many of the other tasks required to keep us alive.”

“Okay, you’re being square with us and I appreciate that,” Rusty said, removing the fourth to last charm. “You’re right, I’m not gonna let you get any more of me than you’ve got. So how do we fix this? I’ve got two runes to work with right now, maybe we could figure something out?”

“Memory and hole,” Roz said, rubbing where his chin would be if he weren’t a little gray alien. “Maybe you could erase the memories of the pain as it happened?”

“That would tend to the memories of it, but not the pain itself.” The Lion said.

“Maybe I could make a hole between the parts of me that feel pain and the parts that let me know pain is there?” Rusty said.

The Lion didn’t like that idea at all. “No! You would kill yourself, or worse, if you started putting holes in your nervous system. You could even render yourself unable to heal the condition, or unable to use your runes. The reason the runes hurt is because your body and brain are forcibly adapted to interface with them. Severing that link is… unwise, at best.”

“Ooooh!” Roz said, brightening up. “We could try that on a bad guy some time!”

“Get your heads together, guys,” Rusty said, removing the second to last charm. “Running out of time for new ideas. Help me out?”

Roz and the Lion started tossing ideas out, but nothing really clicked. Not until Rusty’s was undoing the last charm, and some of the Lion’s words caught Rusty’s attention. “Say that again?”

“I said that by setting this tradition I brought this upon us,” the Lion sighed. “By refusing to show pain, as a sign of respect to my fallen companions, I have possibly set the seeds for our downfall. And I regret that.”

“It’s showing pain,” Rusty thought. “That’s it! I just have to not show the pain!”

And with the last charm in his hand, and no time left, he closed his eyes and cast the spell. “Make my body forget how to show signs of pain.”

Conceal physical symptoms to painful stimuli!

Committed chakra: 3/198

Cost: 1 chakra

Remaining free chakra: 194/198

Rusty’s eyes shot open wide, and he almost yelled. Not because of the spell, because all he felt from that was a mild tingling across his body. But because the number on his chakra pool was utterly ludicrous. He’d been what, at forty-something last time he’d checked?

Roz was unseen to the satyrs, and didn’t have to hold back. “One hundred and ninety-eight? What the heck? How did we even… oh. Oh wait.” his eyes shifted to the Lion.”

“Yes,” the Lion said. “I have some control over where my departing chakra goes. You absorbed the majority of my essence when I activated your link. Unfortunately your chakra network was too underdeveloped to absorb all of it, but you benefit from my fall.”

Well heck, now there was no reason NOT to double up a bit. He cast his second enchantment, while he slowly, carefully stacked the charm with the others. “Eliminate my memories of pain a fraction of a second after I feel it,” he thought and willed it into existence, concentrating on visualizing the grayish words in the darkness behind his eyelids.

Selective Near-instantaneous memory editing upon self!

Committed chakra: 04/198

Trauma reducer granted!

Cost: 3 Chakra

Remaining free Chakra: 191/198

“A little expensive,” Roz murmured.

“It affects his entire nervous system, it should be,” the Lion murmured. “But this memory rune is quite flexible and useful for subtle workings upon the self. Interesting… ah! Before I forget. Rusty, do not leave this in place for longer than you must. It will do terrible things to your development and nerves if you do so. The body has many small processes that will fail in time if no new pain is registered.”

“Okay,” Rusty said, staring at the yellow spike in the center of the Lion’s chest. “I guess it’s time to do this thing?”

He took a second to look up, then. And he saw that they’d gained quite an audience. Up along the shaft that ran through the center of the fortress, on the little ledges and openings to the upper floors that lined the sides of it, figures stood. Grach and satyrs watched in silence. It was almost like being in church, except he was the preacher.

There was a weird sense of stage fright. But the Lion broke in before it went too long.

“Your leg, I’m thinking. About midway down the calf.”

“What?” Rusty almost vocalized that, but closed his mouth before he could break the surrounding feeling of sanctity.

“You’ll need to balance out your chakra network. It… ah, it would take too long to explain! If the runes are implanted at specific points, then you will live longer. Put it into the muscles of your calf, midway to your foot. It doesn’t matter which calf.”

“Roz?” Rusty thought.

“Um… Maybe? I don’t know? The runes don’t have a guide for this part of things.”

Lord knew he was in enough hot water already, a longer lifespan could only help things. Before he could lose his courage, Rusty reached out to the rune, settled his hand around it until he was sure the ridges wouldn’t break his skin, and broke the crystal.

There was a high-pitched crack. It came away easier than he thought it would, and he stumbled back.

“They’ll blame that on the awkwardness of a new body, particularly a child’s. Now, quickly! The rune won’t last long. Speed is its namesake and its drawback!”

The Lion wasn’t lying. The rune shard was melting away like an ice cube under tap water.

Rusty sat down on the ground, hiked his robe up a little, and buried the point of the shard into the side of his right calf.

Oh.

Oh wow.

Oh BOY was this bad.

“It’s all right to sit there,” the Lion said, his voice strained. It was hard to hear him over Roz screaming his head off. “They expect it to take some time. Not more than a few hours.”

Rusty closed his eyes. Hours.

Perhaps the trauma filter helped. Perhaps it didn’t.

But after the satyrs cleared away, seemingly satisfied. After the grach hooted their approval, and left to… celebrate? After all of that, he heard the pattering of feet behind him, and though it hurt more, though it fanned the flames of the bonfire currently consuming every nerve in his body, Rusty shifted to see Ken and Alice approaching him, almost timidly.

“Rusty?” Alice asked, her voice echoing in the grand hall. “Are you all right?”

“No,” Rusty said.